ADIC Buys Tape Startup V-Stor

Tape industry player Advanced Digital Information Corp. this week acquired the intellectual property and staff of virtual tape start-up V-Stor LLC for an undisclosed price.

The technology being developed by stealth-mode V-Stor, of Santa Clara, Calif., lets disks appear as tapes to an application, operating system or intelligent storage device. That already exists for mainframe systems to break mainframes one-to-one file-to-tape ratio. In todays open systems world, disks, which are nearing tape in cost-effectiveness, can serve as virtual tapes to accomplish faster recovery over multiple streams and real-time partitioning, said Jonathon Otis, senior vice president of technology at ADIC, of Redmond, Wash.

"Well be about half a year" to turning V-Stors work into a product line, Otis said. "We already had big portions of what we needed, in terms of the management of data on disk. This gives us effectively a new way of collecting data."

The remaining obstacle to the product rollout is coding time, not engineering feats, he said.

Robert Amatruda, a tape industry analyst with International Data Corp., said education is probably a more significant issue.

"There are many companies out there that are trying to create that same functionality, [but[ people dont walk in the door and ask for something to do that," said Amatruda, in Framingham, Mass. Still, "customers feel the pain around backup and managing the data. It seems like a sound approach to me."